"

Search Tools: Databases vs Search Engines

You’ll likely have to find a variety of sources for your research topic! For your research, the search tools you’ll likely use the most are search engines and library databases.

What are databases? Databases are organized collections of data. Library databases contain information about and provide access to books, eBooks, articles, and more! Students can use library databases to get access to information and sources that are not available to the general public without a fee.

You may have been told to avoid Google and other search engines for research in the past, but they can be powerful tools! Search engines are great places to find news and magazine articles, popular opinions, government websites (which often contain research reports and statistics), social media posts, commercial and organization websites, and more!

Iceburg in water with small amount above water and 75 percent of it below the water. This shows that 4 percent of the web content is on the surface, which is what most of us see every day, and 96 percent of what is on the web is part of the deep web, which includes for pay information behind paywalls like ebooks, library databases, and scholarly articles.

However, not all information is available in Google. When you use search engines, you’re just scratching the surface of all the information that’s stored online! Many scholarly sources, like peer-reviewed research articles, are kept behind paywalls, meaning you would need to pay or subscribe to the journal or publisher to access that information.

That’s where the library databases come in!

definition

License

Fulton Library Research Tutorial Copyright © by 10006552a. All Rights Reserved.